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Marketing Mondays - Let's experiment! (10th ed., 2010)

3/29/2010

3 Comments

 
Hello everyone,

Just over a week ago, I ventured back to the UK for a visit. 

Since I’ve been staying in Israel for the past few months, I forgot how wonderful the world of air travel can be – I am trying to use my sarcasm here.

To make a long story short, I got delayed and missed the connection I was supposed to have in Istanbul.  All of this was due to the original flight being delayed and poor communication from our airline - Turkish Airlines.

As an avid traveller, I have to say the service was appalling – from the staff in Tel Aviv to the airline stewardess to the ground crew – I can’t say a positive word about any of them.  They not only made us feel like we were overreacting before we boarded our flight but they also deceived us by telling us they were going to hold our connecting plane for us but didn’t.  To top it all off, when we were told that we wouldn’t be flying to London that night, we ended up having to wait three hours to get transported to a hotel.  It was a very unnerving and disappointing experience.  As I’m sure you can imagine, I won’t be flying with this airline anytime soon.

For a full account of my adventure, I urge you to go to my new travel blog, Travelling Starfish, and read about the journey.

As I sat in the Istanbul airport the next day, waiting to finally board our flight to London, a light bulb sparked.  I thought to myself – “What a good example of a bad customer service experience” and I thought, “This airline better watch out as the world is a much smaller place now than it used to be.” 

Before customers could only talk of their negative experiences through traditional word of mouth, but now people can post their experiences on a host of websites, chat rooms and social networking sites. 

So, what is this experiment I’m talking about? 

The experiment is to see how quickly I can spread the word.  Not to lower business to Turkish Airlines but to elicit a response and possibly make a company like this realize every negative customer service experience has the potential to impact their future – from a customer and revenue perspective – like never before.

The experiment begins with me writing about it...here, on my travel blog, on Facebook, on travel sites.  Over the next 2 weeks, I’ll be using various social networking tools to spread the word of what happened to me and my concerns from a customer service perspective.

I’m hoping that the power of social networking will stimulate some reaction that I can share. 

I’ll be posting updates on my tracked progress on the blog so stay tuned, pass it on & comment away,

Have a great marketing week,

Miriam Berger

3 Comments
Randall
3/29/2010 02:14:38 am

I think customer service flows down from the top. The better employees are treated, the more they appreciate their customers. If the main message to employees is "you're lucky to have job" their attitude becomes "you're lucky we sold you a ticket".
Economic conditions are also impacting expectations and performance. At one time flying was a luxurious way to travel, but now in North America it is just an extension of bus travel. For example - the line of priority customers is more than half of the plane occupancy. So what's the incentive to be a on a customer loyalty program? For the attendants - their main job now is convenience store clerk. It's pretty hard to make a customer feel comfortable when they're jammed into a seat that's too small.
if you want a real customer service experience take 1st class Via rail.

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Keith F
3/29/2010 04:37:00 am

I was just thinking to myself..."what part of this might be attributed to 'cultural expectations'?".

Granted, it might not make your experience any better, but, while Turkey is pretty modern place and fairly European, perhaps some of how they treat customers might be attributed to standards and norms associated with their experiences in Turkey. I guess I am thinking in terms of sense of urgency in this case.

Like I said, it might not excuse it, and it might not make you feel any more likely to take one of their flights in the future...but it might be something to ponder.

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Miriam link
3/31/2010 04:44:06 pm

Hello Keith/Randy:
Thanks so much for your commments on the blog...sorry its taken me so long to reply. Business has really picked up.

I totally agree with both of your comments.

On the one hand I recognize cultural differences and that there may be employee dissatisfactin.

But...the service we got was a lot worse than that. Throughout the entire experience, across different airports and people we were consistently misled and given either the wrong information/not communicated to at all.

This demonstrates to me a poor customer journey and regardless of culture, the company needs to realize that there are other options out there.

Randy - I do agree that this is the company's issue and that there may be an element of top-down influence.

With this Social Networking experiment, I'm trying to see if the company (hopefully top-down and bottom-up) responds.

Wish me luck and thanks again for sharing your thoughts,
Miriam

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